November 2007

Darjeeling calls stumps

Philip Moore closes the scorebook on a fascinating little cricket club.

Stumps have been called at Darjeeling, not by the casual flicking of the bails by a man in a white coat, but by those with spreadsheets and calculators.

Founded in 1969, the boys at Darjeeling in Dubai played against every touring sides galore – Australia, England, New Zealand, Hampshire, Holland and Surrey. But mostly they just played social cricket against anyone who wanted to take strike or mark out a run.
Warships, particularly from Britain, would dock in Dubai and crew head to Darjeeling, on the edge of the Ras Al Kjhoor industrial area, to feel the red ball in their hands and terra firma under foot. And a convivial after the last wicket had fallen.

Not much changed at Darjeeling over the years except they got satellite telly in the club house, built some nets and put up a sightboard. An autographed photo of the great David Gower was just near one of the TV sets from which we hear his voice describing the game from foreign fields.

The black and white photos on the wall tell the story, the motley local teams and visitors from the days when sideboards were as broad as bats and hair as long as Michael Holding’s run-up.

The great, good, bad and average have walked to Darjeeling’s 22 yards while their kids played at the boundary.

Twenty five years ago ‘veteran’ Joe Senior – who knows how old he was? – used to stride purposely to the wicket at Darjeeling like Plum Warner. Everyone got run out batting with him because he was so slow between wickets. Joe was an institution at Darjeeling. He looked like an elder statesman at a cricket club should.

Some others didn’t get run out so easily. We saw the likes of Graham Roope, Mark Nicholas (yeah, the guy on the TV), Mike Gatting, Younis Ahmed and Pat Pocock play at the old ground, often with the old touring Barbican sides. Kim Hughes, Joel Garner and Waqar Younis coached kids recently.

Everyone seems to have friends made at Darjeeling, I know I have.
And the stories. Who knows if they’e true, but there was once talk of tabs that were bigger than Sachin Tendulkar’s aggregate of Test runs.

Darjeeling kept up a year-round schedule. Most days there was the morning match with the first XI and the Casuals played in the afternoon. The Casuals took on anyone who wanted a game, mostly business houses and visitors.

Apparently Darjeeling Cricket Club was named after a small trading company in Bahrain (not the hill station in India, although there is a photo of it in the club house) whose owner put up the money to build the original facility.

The pitch was concrete covered with a mastic playing surface. This made the deck fairly true to bat on, to put it mildly.

The ground was behind Exiles rugby ground and surrounded by industry and an eight-lane highway. But it had all the charm of an English village green match or a hit-up in Quetta or the Outback. There was even a small amount of green grass the players walked down to get the sandy ground. Probably not enough to suit Sting or Al Gore, but a big effort in the circumstances.

The land belongs to the Dubai government and, basically, it’s time to move on. Progress.

Darjeeling, like its cricket, meandered along at a self-indulgent pace. If you draw a wagon wheel, like they do on the TV, there would be a lot of shots to cow corner.

Not the least attraction of Darjeeling was that for those of us who love the traditions of cricket, it renewed an old benchmark about the way a game ought to be played.

While everything else in cricket has been speeding up, except Dubai’s traffic in all the rush hours now, Darjeeling’s Casuals played their 25 overs matches as steadily as the first morning of a Test.
Quite right.

They had their farewell match at Darjeeling the other day, some regulars versus the Casuals. Former player Craig Sekkar did his Richie Benaud commentary bit which always gets a laugh. Sekkar once peeled off three centuries in as many matches which hadn’t been done in 20 years, and was left stranded in the 80s the fourth week.

The visitors scored 215 and the Casuals couldn’t get them, being out for 180. No-one cared. This was another day at Darjeeling, but, sadly, the last one.

OK, champions have played at the ground – Tim Anderson, a former Australian under 19 captain featured in the last match – but generall those were special occasions. Generally the casuals were sluggish in the outfield, pouchers of little note, military medium bowlers and occasionally handy-to-good batters, although unlikely to be a fair swap for Jacques Kallis, Dwayne Bravo or Matt Hayden.

Drive past Darjeeling any Friday and you saw black, brown, white and brindle. Moslem, Hindu, Christian, Budhist, united by names like Gray Nichols and Kookaburra and strange terms such as deep fine leg. They were everything that’s fine about cricket and presented the game in its purest form.

They were cricket men.